This application requests funds to continue the support and further development of a "Cross Training Research Experience for Undergraduates" program at Albany Medical College, which is designed as a 10-week program to provide cross-disciplinary opportunities for 7 undergraduates majoring in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or Engineering. With careful attention and significant effort, recruiting of these quantitative-thinking students from colleges across the Nation, and with special emphasis on recruiting students from 64 Historically Black Colleges and Universities throughout the Nation, we expect to maintain a competitive applicant pool, from which top candidates will be selected. Students will spend more than two months in a laboratory doing meaningful, authentic, innovative research on a project specially designed for them in such a way as to link their previous training (e.g., physics) to the biomedical science summer project. With the active mentoring of an investigator who is NIH-funded and who has sufficient time and inclination to serve as a mentor for an undergraduate student, the quantitatively thinking Students spend the vast majority of their summer doing a realistic ('bite-sized') research project in a laboratory. They also have Enrichment Activities including safety training, opportunities to explore career options, biomedical information search and retrieval training, extensive training in issues of scientific integrity, interactive learning opportunities focusing on an Overview of Biology (built around the Human Genome Project), seminars to broaden their awareness of biomedical research, and training in scientific writing and in making their own research presentations. The Program Director will provide extensive tracking and evaluation of the students and of the program, making adjustments as necessary and providing summative evaluations to all stakeholders. The program is designed to expose undergraduate students majoring in the quantitative sciences to a biomedical sciences environment, and eventually to help students be more competitive and contributory for careers at the interface of biology and their own chosen discipline. The application details the successful outcomes of this program during the preceding funding period. [unreadable] [unreadable]